What happened to the directory days? The era of The Open Directory Project and The Yahoo Directory is dead and has been dead for years. Yahoo has finally removed links to their old directory from their home page (this could have happened months ago, a year ago? for all I know). Most of the people I talk to on the Net have never heard of DMOZ and have no idea how directories ruled the day many years ago.

Maybe I am one of the few that still search through these directories. What I like most about these old directories, such as dir.yahoo.com, is that they are full of old forgotten sites that have been online and unmodified for years. I enjoy viewing these pages and sites, because for the most part, they all load very quickly, and don’t have millions of advertisements (such as Google Adsense). All the content is written in simple HTML with about half using cascading style sheet (CSS).

The pages I am mainly referring to are the sites and pages published in the early to mid 90’s back when the Internet was hitting its first few waves of the .com craze and everyone had to have their own home page on Homestead.com, GeoCities, or AngleFire. It still amazes me to see how much blood, sweat, and tears people had put into their free hosted home pages. There is a lot of information out there in the ghost town of sites published in the 90’s. Content that doesn’t pull up on Google’s first and second page of results. Literally there are thousands of pages that at one time were the most targeted and visited sites but today have become the Internet’s best kept secret.

This is where BTI search is kicking in a little bit. Naturally I am adding new sites but I have also added these old directories, even JoeAnt.com is in there (not calling that site old, but I am calling being a directory editor a dying breed. I am part of this generation). I know that today Google pretty much rules out the middle man (the directory editor). And there is nothing wrong with that. I love Google and use it daily to find the things I need. But every so often I need to find things that Google doesn’t pick up, and that is when I turn to the directories. My goal is that BTI search delivers the best of both worlds to you… New as well as old content related to what you are looking for. If the content you are looking for isn’t time sensitive, then the age of the published content shouldn’t matter. And in my opinion, older content published on the Net has better quality than new content.